Nadia Belerique: The Archer (Life's a Beach)

Nadia Belerique constructs installations that engage with the poetics of perception and asks how images perform in contemporary culture. Primarily invested in questions around materiality and dematerialization through the illusion of photographs, her image-based works are often interrupted by sculptural objects. Belerique’s new photographic images, The Archer (Life's a Beach), were created with a digital image scanner and discarded rubylith filters from the Toronto Star’s archives (previously used to manipulate photographs in the pre-Photoshop era). Her careful control of the light allowed to enter the scanner bed creates illusions of depth, while inclusions of fingerprints and other debris originally found on the scanner’s glass emphasizes the image’s superficiality.

Belerique, who lives and works in Toronto, received her MFA from the University of Guelph, is a board member at G Gallery, and has recently exhibited at such venues as Narwhal, Daniel Faria Gallery, XPACE, The Drake Hotel and Diaz Contemporary in Toronto. In 2014, she has upcoming shows scheduled at 221A in Vancouver and Daniel Faria Gallery in Toronto.